Drive Angry's Director on Fast Cars, Real Stunts in 3D

In Drive Angry 3D, filmmakers strapped huge, expensive 3D camera rigs to cars traveling 60 mph, performed all the movie's stunts sans CGI, and let their stars do most of the driving. Director Patrick Lussier talks to Popular Mechanics about the challenges that faced the production—and why doing things the hard way was worth it.

Billboards will tell you that the stars of Drive Angry 3D, out February 25, are Nicolas Cage and Amber Heard. But the film has several key players: the muscle cars. And that's because writer/director Patrick Lussier and co-writer Todd Farmer had a very specific movie in mind. "We were talking about what kind of movies we thought would be fun to do in 3D, and we hit on a '70s road movie," says Lussier, who also directed My Bloody Valentine 3D. "So we put cars into the film at different times, and we wanted to get '70s cars."

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In Drive Angry, Cage drives three different classic cars. So before filming started, Lussier subjected the muscle cars to a stereoscopic screen test to see which looked the best in 3D. The director considered using a Dodge Challenger as the hero car, but it was scrapped in favor of a 1969 Charger. Looks weren't the only reason for the switch. "A lot of it was how well the cameras fit inside the cars," Lussier says. "The Charger has such a bigger interior that it made more sense to use it. A lot of it came down to what looked cool and then what was practical." Lussier also looked at Novas—"the car that Roy Scheider drives in The Seven-Ups," he says—but ended up using a 1970 SF Chevelle instead. "The Chevelles were beautiful and so much bigger inside," Lussier says. "And given the action at the end of the movie, it felt like the Chevelle was the way to go because it was meatier and meaner."

The final car the director chose is actually the one Cage drives at the beginning of the film: a 1964 Riviera. "It was the car we wished we had used the most, because it was a beautiful driving car," Lussier says. "It was a shame to smack it up."

And smack up the cars they did. Before production began, Lussier estimated they'd need six of each car to accomplish the various stunts in the film. But given their budget, that number was impossible. Instead, the director and his team made it work with three Chargers and three Chevelles. "We always had a pristine, untouched car," he says. "There was a mega-stunt version that was all caged—very safe and durable so it could do the stunts we needed it to do. And then we had one car that was in various states of decay that worked its way up to being totally destroyed." While all of the Chargers survived relatively unscathed, production completely destroyed one of the Chevelles.

Directing a stereoscopic road movie had myriad challenges, not the least of which was working with expensive 3D camera rigs, each the size of a college student's minifridge. "We were driving at very high speeds with cameras hanging off the end of a crane," Lussier says, "trying to stay ahead of Nic Cage driving at 60 mph the wrong way through traffic."

The production had five Paradise FX 3D camera rigs, each with a special purpose and modified especially for the film. "When you have two cameras, one that's shooting through a mirror and one that's at a 90-degree angle shooting down into the reflection to create the stereo image, you can get very different sets of motion," Lussier says. Filmmakers have to watch out for this, because any discrepancies in the two eye views will make the audience incredibly uncomfortable. "So you have some things you're going to have to correct, or you have to try and get those cameras stable so they move in sync. Most of the time we were successful; sometimes we weren't. Sometimes there's a variety of things you can do to make it work, and sometimes it turns out to be a feature, not a flaw."

Adding another challenge the production faced was Lussier's choice to do the stunts and effects practically rather than relying on CGI. But for the director, practical effects were worth the challenge. "Visually, it's so much more satisfying," he says. "There's something about that feel of real metal on metal. It was like those '70s movies where you had cars flying along at high speed, and you felt the danger on the road."

The unpredictable nature of practical stunt work also appealed to Lussier. In one sequence, stunt coordinators planned to launch a state trooper's vehicle straight off a bridge. Instead, the car caught the edge of the bridge and flipped. "That was amazing," Lussier says. "If you were to animate the sequence, you wouldn't even think to make that part of what it does."

The actors also embraced Lussier's do-it-real philosophy; both Cage and Heard performed most of their own stunts. "Nic is an amazing driver," Lussier says. "He's a total car guy, and he's so good at it. He and the stunt driver, Oakley Lehmen, would drive together, with Oakley behind the wheel and Nic in the passenger's seat. Then Oakley would step out and Nic would just take over." Heard, who drives her own muscle car around L.A., didn't get to do as much driving as she did ass-kicking, but, says Lussier, "Amber did most of that, too."

Putting stereoscopic rigs on cars moving at high speeds with crazy stunts hasn't been attempted before, but Lussier was determined not to let that stop him—and the effort paid off. "When we started the film, the financiers were like, 'No, we don't want to do anything that's never been done before,'" Lussier says. "Our first response was, 'Then don't make a 3D movie.' Because we're going to do things every single day that's nobody's ever done before. But we did it—and so much of that was just because we were foolish enough to think that we could do it. You're not smart enough to realize, wow, you shouldn't be able to do this."